Page 185 of Marrying the Savage

When I pull back, she touches my cheek once, then seems to remember herself and drops her hand. “I’ll bring tea to your room,” she says.

“No,” I say too quickly.

Damir looks at me. Marina looks at me too.

“I mean, not now,” I add. “I’m tired.”

It’s not exactly a lie.

I am tired. I’m also restless, angry, shaken, and so full of Damir from that kiss in the car that I feel like my skin is too tight.

Marina nods. “Of course.”

Damir tells the men something in Russian. I understand none of it, but the tone is enough. Orders, routes, security, probably death threats arranged by priority. Mikhail answers him. Nikolai disappears toward the side hallway. The house starts moving around us again.

I should go to my room. I tell myself that as I turn toward the stairs. I should close the door, shower, change, call Anya, and figure out what kind of lie I’m going to keep telling until it collapses on me.

Instead, I stop halfway up.

Damir is still in the hall below, speaking to Mikhail now, his coat gone because I am wearing it, his shirt stretched across his shoulders, his jaw hard, his sleeves rolled back enough that I can see the veins in his forearms. There is blood on his knuckles from the man at the club. Not much. Enough.

He looks up. Our eyes meet.

Everything in me goes still for one heavy second.

Then he says something to Mikhail without looking away from me, and Mikhail leaves.

Damir starts up the stairs.

I should keep walking. I don’t.

He reaches me on the landing, stopping one step below so we are nearly eye level. His face is controlled, but his eyes are not. His gaze drops to my mouth, then my throat, then back to my eyes.

“You should rest,” he says. “And probably see a doctor.”

“I know.”

His jaw tightens. “Sofia.”

“No doctors tonight.”

“You were hurt.”

“I said no doctors.”

He exhales through his nose, and I can see him fighting the instinct to order it anyway.

He doesn’t.

That does something to me.

Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe basic restraint should not feel like a gift. But after everything, after Sergei, Dmitri, the church, the guards, the house, the lies, the running, the panic in that club, and the car ride where Damir could have demanded every answer and chose not to, his silence feels like more than silence.

It feels like effort. For me.

“I’m going to your room,” I say.

His face is unreadable. “My room?”